Language , Thought , and culture.

2. Language , Thought , and culture. The relationship between language and thought: The manner in which an idea or fact is stated affects the way we conceptualize the idea . Words shape our lives.

3. Euphemisms : Certain thoughts are taboo or certainwords connote something less than desirable .For example, toilets are ‘’rest rooms’’ and garbagemen are ‘sanitary engineers’. -Verbal labels can shape the way we store event for later recall. (cf. fig. 7.1). Words are not the only linguistic category affecting thought. The way a sentence is structured will affect nuances of meaning . For example, questions using ‘’the’’ tended to produce more false recognition of events .

4. On the discourse level of language , We are familiar with the persuasiveness of an emotional speech or a well-written novel . These are common examples of the influence of language on our cognition and affective states Culture is really an integral part of the interaction between language and thought. Cultural patterns of cognition and customs are sometimes explicitly coded in language . Conversational discourse styles, for example, may be a factor of culture .

5. Lexical items may reflect something about the intersection of culture and cognition. For example, color categorization in different cultures depends on the labels that language provides to shape the person’s overall cognition organization of color and to cause varying degrees of color discrimination. From such observations and many others, a question emerges: .

6. Does language reflect a cultural world view , or does language actually shape the world view ? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the Whorfian hypothesis. (p.199) The linguistic system of a language is also the shaper of ideas. The world is presented in a flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds- and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds .

7. Roland Wardhaugh, offered the following alternative to a strong view of the Whorfian hypothesis; Some concepts are more ‘codable’ that is easier to express in some languages than in others . However, every natural language is an extremely rich system which allows its speakers to overcome any predispositions that exist. The act of learning to think in another language may require a considerable degree of mastery of that language , but a second language learner does not have to learn to think, in general, all over again . He can make positive use of prior experiences to facilitate the process of learning by retaining that which is valid and valuable for second culture learning and second language learning.

8. Done by : Afaf al-dady .